I let my daughter name her own school. She designed a cover for a "yearbook" I guess that is one of the things she misses from public school. We are Oak Academy, because we sit at the desk and look out at the oak tree in our yard.

Hi, I'm new here. I'm a homeschooling mom with a teaching degree. In my state that allows me to teach other kids in my home. Last year, in addition to my son, I had two other grade school kids. We gave our home school a name by taking the first three letters of each name and putting them togther. I also kept a blog and created a parallel name by taking the two letters of their "computer" names and came up with "RaToNa." I found an appropriate clip art on the computer and used it to make matching "polo" shirts and sweatshirts for field trips. The kids had a lot of fun with the name.

As an aside, I also noticed that with the matching "field trip uniforms" we were treated much more like a school than just another homeschool group.

One of my students last year did not return so we didn't bother with a name this year; simply using the name of our curriculum and my last name as our school name.

Just a word of advice from a veteran: what may seem like a cute, clever, whimsical name for your school when you are just starting out with preschoolers can feel like a real albatross to your kids when they are older for a variety of situations. Think filling out forms for community sports, etc. where name of school is requested, but much more importantly when they apply to college. Yeah, I know you think that won't be happening from your HS but it might. In my case, I had established myself as a private school, legally in my state and had a specific # attached to my school which was useful in signing them up for our state's proficiency exam, SAT's etc. so it seemed problematic to me to change it as time went on. So I tried to use stationary that reflected a tongue-in-cheek reference to my school name when I wrote cover letters for college admissions committees, but boy I wish I'd thought that one over better initially and I know my sons wished that as well. They couldn't lose that name until they had a college diploma to put on their resume instead!

learningallthetime wrote:Just a word of advice from a veteran: what may seem like a cute, clever, whimsical name for your school when you are just starting out with preschoolers can feel like a real albatross to your kids when they are older for a variety of situations. Think filling out forms for community sports, etc. where name of school is requested, but much more importantly when they apply to college. Yeah, I know you think that won't be happening from your HS but it might. In my case, I had established myself as a private school, legally in my state and had a specific # attached to my school which was useful in signing them up for our state's proficiency exam, SAT's etc. so it seemed problematic to me to change it as time went on. So I tried to use stationary that reflected a tongue-in-cheek reference to my school name when I wrote cover letters for college admissions committees, but boy I wish I'd thought that one over better initially and I know my sons wished that as well. They couldn't lose that name until they had a college diploma to put on their resume instead!

I have heard the same said by other homeschool parents. Others have said not to use your last name in the school name either.

Our state requires us to pick a name and register the school, fortunately we do not have to do that a for a few more years, so I have loads of time to think about it.

My mom wanted to name our HS The Little Red School House (because our house is red) but we told her that there was no way we were going to put that down on college applications and the like. So, we ended up with Part of the name being Parkside because we live 5 houses down from a park.

We don't have to register our school name. I chose Strawberry School when ds was just a toddler. I expect him to choose a more adult name (a new one every year if the kids choose), but he's pretty attached to it for now.